Professional Experience
With over 10 years of software engineering experience across multiple industries, I've built expertise in distributed systems, cloud architecture, and technical leadership. Below is a timeline of my professional journey.
2023 - Present
Software Development Manager
Amazon Web Services
- Built and scaled a high-performing organization of 20 engineers across 4 pods, delivering mission-critical customer experience features for Amazon Connect used by thousands of enterprises globally.
- Defined and executed a technical strategy and multi-year roadmap balancing near-term delivery with long-term innovation, including Generative AI-driven automation and a unified state machine powering non-media workloads.
- Instituted engineering excellence programs that cut onboarding time by 50%, raised test coverage from 60% to 90%, and improved code quality through automation and CI/CD modernization.
- Mentored and promoted four engineers into technical leadership roles, achieving 90% team retention during high-growth phases.
- Led cross-org initiatives spanning 5+ partner teams, delivering high-visibility, customer-impacting launches with minimal slippage despite aggressive timelines.
- Operationalized a metrics-driven culture that reduced production incidents by 40% while achieving 99.99% system reliability.
- Drove org-wide architectural modernization, influencing Connect-wide best practices through technical councils, design reviews, and mentorship programs.
Engineering Management
Generative AI
Technical Strategy
Operational Excellence
Mentoring
2022 - 2023
Senior Software Engineer
Amazon Web Services
- Led multiple 10+ person teams through projects that delivered critical contact center capabilities, including contact templates and pause-resume, by developing AWS public APIs and admin and customer-facing user interfaces.
- Collaborated with product management to define functional and non-functional requirements working backwards from customer experience, aligning technical strategy with business needs.
- Championed automation over manual work for region expansion, operational mitigating actions, and repetitive maintenance tasks.
- Worked with application security engineers to develop comprehensive access-control and vulnerability-analysis plans, ensuring systems stayed safe to operate as the security risk posture evolved.
- Bar raised 20+ operational readiness review plans, ensuring launches included operational best practices that reduced incidents and sped up discovery, impact analysis, mitigation, and root-causing.
- Mentored fellow engineers on public API schema design, analytics, and persona modeling, promoting a culture of collaboration and continuous learning.
Leadership
Security
Project Delivery
System Design
Mentoring
2020 - 2022
Software Engineer
Amazon Web Services
- Designed and developed an omni-channel orchestration platform for Amazon Connect that handles approximately 40 million contacts monthly across multiple regions, supporting mission-critical business systems.
- Implemented core components of a state machine that addressed complex distributed system challenges such as dual writes and concurrent request processing while maintaining high availability at scale.
- Created reusable and extensible software components that supported multiple use cases, unblocked development bottlenecks, and reduced duplication across work streams.
- Led operational improvement initiatives focused on deployment safety in CI/CD environments, customer-specific throttling mechanisms, and automated load testing to ensure infrastructure reliability.
Distributed Systems
Finite State Machines
Large Scale Systems
High Availability
2018 - 2020
Senior Engineer - ML Platform
Nordstrom
- Enabled data scientists across the organization to conduct frequent ML experiments through a flexible, scalable platform that accommodated diverse language and framework preferences.
- Developed rapid prototyping capabilities for machine learning models, accelerating the time from concept to implementation.
- Provisioned compute resources using Apache Spark applications and Kubernetes pods to support all phases of the ML model development lifecycle.
- Architected the platform from concept to production, working closely with stakeholders to identify and implement critical components.
- Scaled the platform to support end-to-end pipelines for 10+ ML projects and the productionization of 15+ models.
Featured Talk
I presented my work on this ML Platform at a tech conference. Watch the video
Machine Learning
Platform Architecture
Apache Spark
Kubernetes
2018
Senior Engineer
Nordstrom
- Developed data ingestion processes from multiple sources including HDFS, S3, Kinesis streams, Kafka, and Redshift data warehouses into a centralized S3-based data lake.
- Created ETL pipelines primarily using Apache Spark, with additional tooling from Apache NiFi and AWS Lambda to pre-process data for machine learning applications.
- Implemented robust monitoring, alerting, and metrics for data pipelines to ensure reliability and performance.
- Built data views using Apache Hive and Presto for efficient querying of data stored in the data lake.
- Provisioned and managed infrastructure using Terraform, ensuring consistent and repeatable deployments.
- Orchestrated workflow processes using Apache Airflow DAGs to maintain regular execution schedules.
Key Achievement
Designed and implemented a high-throughput pipeline capable of ingesting and processing 1 million records every 30 seconds.
Apache Spark
ETL
Data Lakes
Terraform
Airflow
2017 - 2018
Engineer II
Nordstrom
- Served on the Customer Profile Services team, sourcing data and exposing public-facing APIs for end customers.
- Configured and managed Spark clusters to process approximately 500 million records and transfer them to DynamoDB operational datastores with robust fault tolerance and retry mechanisms.
- Developed real-time data consumers for AWS Kinesis streams that curated and persisted data with minimal latency.
- Created RESTful public APIs with token-based authentication using Amazon API Gateway, Cognito, and Lambda.
- Implemented comprehensive health monitoring for all systems using AWS Lambda, with PagerDuty and Slack integrations via Amazon SNS.
- Architected enterprise applications using serverless technologies that optimized costs, improved monitoring capabilities, and maintained separation of concerns.
- Developed performance testing frameworks using Artillery scripts and published results to Grafana dashboards for ongoing optimization.
Serverless
API Development
AWS
Apache Spark
Performance Testing
2015 - 2017
Software Engineer II
CDK Global (Formerly ADP)
- Participated in the audience management team, developing systems to gauge user intent and deliver personalized experiences through data-driven business intelligence reports.
- Worked as a full-stack developer creating Java/Spring microservices based on domain-driven design principles, and developing single-page applications using NodeJS and AngularJS.
- Built both batch and streaming big data pipelines using Kafka and RabbitMQ message brokers, with Apache Spark and Akka for stream processing.
- Mentored junior developers and interns while providing technical guidance to offshore teams and serving as Scrum Master.
- Contributed to the Docker adoption initiative, helping teams across the company containerize their applications and deploy them on CoreOS grids with Consul for service discovery.
Java
Spring
NodeJS
Angular
Docker
Kafka
2014 - 2015
Software Engineer I
CDK Global (Formerly ADP)
- Contributed to the social media management team, developing a consolidated platform serving over 26,000 car dealerships.
- Specialized in aggregating social media feeds from multiple channels using REST APIs to create unified content streams.
- Developed RESTful web services using J2EE/Spring frameworks and played a key role in establishing the company's Node-Angular web application stack.
Recognition
Promoted from Software Engineer I after 11 months, with responsibility for nine state and federal carrier integrations at nationwide scale.
REST APIs
J2EE
Spring
Node
Angular
2013 - 2014
Software Development Intern
UPS
- Developed integration middleware applications using OSGI architecture principles to create modular, maintainable software components.
- Gained experience with enterprise technologies including JBoss Fuse ESB, Camel Mediation Router, Apache ActiveMQ, RESTful Web Services, and XSLT transformations.
- Collaborated with business analysts to translate business requirements into technical specifications.
- Worked across teams to establish technical contracts and create interface agreement documentation.
- Participated in architectural design and documentation processes alongside system architects.
- As an early team member, demonstrated initiative by helping to kick-start projects and onboard new team members.
OSGI
JBoss
Apache Camel
ActiveMQ
REST
2012 - 2013
Technical Consultant & Teaching Assistant
University of Cincinnati
Technical Consultant (Feb 2013 - Jun 2013)
- Maintained various computing systems throughout the university campus.
- Resolved software, operating system, and network-related issues for faculty and students.
- Provided technical support services to university staff and faculty members.
Teaching Assistant (Aug 2012 - Feb 2013)
- Assisted freshman students in introductory and advanced MATLAB courses.
- Supervised and graded assignments for basic engineering foundations classes.
- Provided one-on-one support to students in the campus tutoring center.
MATLAB
Technical Support
Teaching